CILIP Executive Briefing Engaging the Disengaged

Libraries and information services are ideally positioned to play a key role in helping young people who are Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEETs) become engaged and secure their participation in public services.

To provide a forum for discussion of this increasingly important issue, CILIP: The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is organising an Executive Briefing with the theme Engaging the disengaged: repositioning LIS services in the NEETs agenda. It will take place at its London offices on Tuesday 18 November 2008.

Speakers have been secured from across the NEETs community from: The Department for Children Schools and Families; The Learning and Skills Council; The Adult Institute of Adult Continuing Education; The Reading Agency; and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Two county councils and two London borough councils will also present case studies.

The aim is to help clarify the thinking of Government Departments and agencies to NEETs and explain the implications for public funding. The speakers will debate the issues with delegates and help develop recommendations for LIS in supporting NEETs to answer the question 'What role can alternative providers play in engaging NEET young people?'

The DCC has announced an innovative programme of pre-conference workshops to be held in Edinburgh on Monday 1 December 2008. These half-day workshops will cover a range of tools and services including the DCC Data Curation Lifecycle model, the Data Audit Framework Toolkit, the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) Interactive toolkit and a demonstration of recently developed DCC Curation Tools.

There will also be a Repository Curation Service Environments (RECURSE) Workshop, jointly supported by OGF-Europe and DReSNET. The workshop programme will be followed by a pre-conference drinks reception at Our Dynamic Earth.

SUETr Interoperability Workshop

Library of London School of Economics and Political Science,10 Portugal Street, London, WC2A 2HD9 December 2008

Institutional Repositories should not exist in isolation. They are not closed silos, dusty graveyards of data but rather vibrant information resources designed to facilitate scholarly communication and research innovation. In this JISC-funded SUETr workshop we hope to shed some light on some of the technologies you could use to achieve interoperability and consider some of the issues that might arise.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), the Repositories Support Project (RSP), the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the JISC are organising a joint workshop on 12 December at the Novotel Hotel, Euston, London. The intention is to bring together key stakeholders, the repository managers and preservation experts, at a practical focussed event to talk together and share perspectives, requirements, problems and solutions. It is hoped that the workshop will lead to collective recommendations for what the next moves for repository managers and preservation specialists should be to provide practical focussed support, services and tools. The workshop should in addition further repository managers' understanding of how to implement preservation strategies and processes.

As well as the formal presentations there will also be a marketplace when there will be an opportunity to view posters, and engage with project teams and see demonstrations of the latest tools. The day will close with a participative discussion session. Prior to the event the organisers will gather concerns and requirements from repository managers and preservation experts/services and synthesise them into 'Top 5 Concerns', 'Top 5 Wishes' and 'Top 5 Solutions' (for practical implementation). They will then be collated to form the basis for the panel discussion.

Digital Futures Academy 2009: London and Sydney

King's College London has announced the Digital Futures 5-day training event"Digital Futures Academy: from digitization to delivery"London, UK: 27 April - 1 May 2009Sydney, Australia: 2 - 6 February 2009http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/

For 2009 we have 2 instances of Digital Futures, one in Sydney, Australia and another in London, UK.

Led by experts of international renown, Digital Futures focuses on the creation, delivery and preservation of digital resources from cultural and memory institutions. Digital Futures is designed for managers and other practitioners from the library, museum, heritage and cultural sectors looking to understand the strategic and management issues of developing digital resources from digitisation to delivery.

Digital Futures will cover the following core areas:

Planning and management

Fund raising

Understanding the audience

Metadata - introduction and implementation

Copyright and intellectual property

Sustainability

Financial issues

Visual and image based resource creation and delivery

Implementing digital resources

Digital preservation

There will be visits to two institutions to see behind the scenes and receive expert presentations. For Digital Futures London this will be the National Gallery and the National Archives.

Digital Futures aims for no more than 25-30 delegates and every delegate will have the opportunity to also spend one-to-one time with a Digital Futures leader to discuss issues specific to them. Digital Futures will issue a certificate of achievement to each delegate.

Digital Futures is run by King's Digital Consultancy Services and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London working in co-operation with PALINET, USA. Digital Futures Australasia is made possible by the co-operation of the Library at the University of Technology Sydney.

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

Since 2001, the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries has served as a major international forum focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. JCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term 'digital libraries' including (but not limited to) new forms of information institutions; operational information systems with all manner of digital content; new means of selecting, collecting, organising, and distributing digital content; and theoretical models of information media, including document genres and electronic publishing.

Digital libraries may be viewed as a new form of information institution or as an extension of the services libraries currently provide. Representatives from academe, government, industry, and others are invited to participate in this annual conference. The conference draws from a broad array of disciplines including computer science, information science, librarianship, archival science and practice, museum studies and practice, technology, medicine, social sciences, and humanities. JCDL 2009 will be held in Austin, Texas. JCDL 2009 is hosted by the School of Information at the University of Texas, and is organised by an international committee of scholars and leaders in the Digital Libraries field. Four hundred delegates are expected for the five days of events including a day of cutting-edge tutorials; 3 days of papers, panels, and keynotes; and a day of research workshops.

Biennial Conference of the British Chapter of the International Society for KnowledgeOrganization (ISKO UK)University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT22-23 June 2009http://www.iskouk.org/conf2009/

The ISKO UK 2009 conference "Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources" will address issues in the organization and integration of text, images, data and voice - multimedia and multilingual. Among the highlights will be keynote addresses from Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and Professor David Crystal, the renowned author, linguist and broadcaster. A wide spectrum of contributors from across the knowledge organisation sector will follow, ensuring ample cross-fertilisation of ideas. Networking will be central, in more than one way. Over the past year ISKO UK has attracted large and lively audiences of content and information architects, website developers, knowledge engineers, information managers and many others to its afternoon meeting series. The conference aims to extend this wide audience to ensure that all aspects of knowledge organisation are represented.

About the organiser:ISKO UK is a not-for-profit scientific/professional association with the objective of promoting research and communication in the domain of knowledge organisation, within the broad field of information science and related disciplines. The conference organizing team is closely supported by leading thinkers and practitioners in the knowledge organisation arena.

Preservation of Web Resources Handbook Available

Version 1.0 of the PoWR Handbook is now available. The Handbook is the main deliverable of the JISC Preservation of Web Resources Project and offers valuable advice for practitioners embarking on a Web resource preservation strategy or interested in issues related to improving long-term access to Web resources. The handbook includes case studies, scenarios and a glossary. It is available in PDF and from Web 2.0 services issuu and Scribd.

Latest Issue of Code4Lib Journal Available

The fourth issue of The Code4Lib Journal is now available at http://journal.code4lib.org/ The Code4Lib Journal exists to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.

DRIVER and eIFL.net Sign Memorandum of Understanding

DRIVER and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries) have identified demand for co-operation in order to progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs through digital repositories.

DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, to establish a flexible, robust, and scalable infrastructure for all European and world-wide digital repositories, managing scientific information in an Open Access model increasingly demanded by researchers, funding organisations and other stakeholders. DRIVER's mission is to expand its content base, supporting the global research community with high-quality research output, including textual research papers and complex forms of scholarly electronic publication.

Rima Kupryte, Director of eIFL.net, said, 'eIFL.net and DRIVER share the vision that research institutions should contribute actively and co-operatively to a global, interoperable, trusted and long-term data and service infrastructure based on Open Access digital repositories. This agreement includes joint approaches to consolidation of national communities for the European repository network and active joint dissemination of best practice of Open Access scholarly communication in countries and regions without such formal policy.'

Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of DRIVER and Director of the Goettingen State and University Library commented, 'DRIVER can only be successful through collaborating with all relevant stakeholders and by including all countries. eIfL has an excellent track record in supporting developing countries. Co-operation with eIFL will contribute to the joint vision through an established communication network and enthusiastic pioneers in many countries.'

Over 800,000 journal articles are to be made freely available to universities, research councils and colleges in the UK.

Following an open procurement process, JISC Collections is making four journal archives freely available, to all colleges, universities and research councils in the UK. These archives from the American Chemical Society, Brill Academic Publishers, ProQuest, and Taylor & Francis include 230 peer-reviewed journals with some of the most important articles in the arts, built environment, humanities, life sciences, physical sciences and the social sciences.

JISC Collections' purchase of these archives means that researchers, teaching staff and students can now have free access to more than 150 years of content and over 800,000 fully searchable articles.

Researchers will now be able to search these articles at a time and place of their own convenience rather than locate print versions which may only be available in a select number of libraries that were able to afford to subscribe to them.

Beyond the Silos of the LAMs

A report on library, archive and museum collaboration commissioned from Diane Zorich and OCLC Program Officers Günter Waibel and Ricky Erway is now available on the RLG Programs Web site. "Beyond the Silos of the LAMs - Collaboration among Libraries, Archives, and Museums" (.pdf: 334K/59 pp.) highlights lessons learned from five LAM workshops held at RLG Partner institutions in the US and the UK. It contains information about inspiring collaborative projects in campus environments. The bulk of the report, however, is dedicated to the catalysts which allow collaboration to thrive. These insights should be helpful to anyone who is trying to foster deeper working relationships.

3,000 Hours of Historic News Footage Available to FEI/HEIs

Over 3,000 hours of historic news footage from ITN's archive division, ITN Source, has been made available to Further and Higher Education institutions in the UK, giving educators and students cost-free access to a century of video material.

The NewsFilm Online service, http://www.nfo.ac.uk/, featuring ITN and Reuters content, forms part of a multi-million digitisation programme, funded by JISC to promote the innovative use of ICT in education and research. All disciplines across Further and Higher Education will have access to the archive for research, teaching and learning.

One of the unique elements of the archive licence agreement is that users from subscribing educational institutions who access the material can download clips and edit them to create their own user content for projects - a first for this type of material.

The emphasis of the tutorial is on finding copyright cleared images which are available free; facilitating quick, hassle-free access to a vast range of online photographs and other visual resources.

This tutorial has been created by TASI - the JISC Advisory Service for digital media and Intute as part of the Intute: Virtual Training Suite. The tutorial was funded and supported by the Higher Education Academy / JISC Collaboration Initiative.

OAI ORE 1.0 Published

Over the past two years the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, Web, library, repository, and eScience communities to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of Web resources. These standards provide the foundation for applications and services that can visualise, preserve, transfer, summarise, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction: including multiple page Web documents, multiple format documents in institutional repositories, scholarly datasets, and online photo and music collections. The OAI-ORE standards leverage the core Web architecture and concepts emerging from related efforts including the semantic web, linked data, and Atom syndication. As a result, they integrate both with the emerging machine-readable Web, Web 2.0, and the future evolution of networked information.

The production versions of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation documents are now available to the public, with a table of contents page at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/toc. This public release is the culmination of several months of testing and review of initial alpha and beta releases. The participation and feedback from the wider OAI-ORE community, especially the OAI-ORE technical committee, was instrumental to the process leading up to this production release.

The documents in the release describe a data model to introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the Web. They also detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in the popular Atom syndication format, in RDF/XML, and RDFa. The documents included in the release are: